Cycling Freds

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Luke from Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Hi, Luke. Welcome.

Hey, Luke. What’s up?

I am a cyclist, a pretty avid one these days.

And a couple years ago when I was shopping for a cycling jersey, I wanted to buy one from my favorite team. They were Garmin Sharp back then, and they wore an Argyle jersey. So I wanted an Argyle cycling jersey.

And so as I was searching around, seeing if it would be okay to buy one and wear it to races, I came across a term that people use in cycling that’s a thread. So like if someone buys a team cycling jersey or a team bike and they’re not any good as a cyclist, they’re called a thread.

I see.

So they have all the trappings. I was wondering if you guys ever heard that before.

They’re a wannabe, huh?

Maybe I’ve heard that before. Do you use that term for yourself? Is it something you wear with pride?

No. I avoid it as much as possible as I think most people do.

Okay. It’s Fred, F-R-E-D.

Yeah, exactly like the name.

Okay, great.

And so this is somebody who has pretensions or a bit of a poser.

Yeah, I’d say so. Generally, you’d apply it to kind of a chubby guy who gets excited about bike racing and buys thousands of dollars worth of stuff and can’t climb a hill or something like that.

Well, I am a chubby guy. I do have a problem climbing hills. I do ride a bike, but I didn’t spend anywhere near that amount of money. So I’m good. I’m not afraid.

You know, I think it’s vaguely registered somewhere on my mind in my passing through various slang dictionaries and stuff. I don’t know very much about it.

Looking on the Internet, I find that, believe it or not, Wikipedia has a fairly decent entry on it. As, you know, how Wikipedia is. If there’s something that somebody can obsess about to the end of time, Wikipedia will have a really great entry on it.

Yeah, definitely.

So I don’t know very much about it. There’s a female equivalent, right?

Doris?

Doris, yeah.

I hadn’t heard that one.

Yeah, they both remind me of the, remember when Poindexter was a slang for nerd? It came from like the Iran-Contra scandals. And what was his name? Admiral Poindexter testifying on live television all day long. He’s the most straight-laced, nerdiest dude you ever met.

Well, yeah, he looked like a Poindexter.

Reminds me of that. But Fred and Poindexter aren’t synonyms, are they?

No. I mean, Fred, you have the outlay of money and the aspiration.

Oh, right, yeah. Don’t you think?

Sure.

Yeah, I don’t know why.

Who’s Fred?

Well, the various things that have been floating around the Internet for about 10 or 15 years all claim that Fred is possibly related to this old dude that everyone knew at one time who was kind of a nice Fred. He had a beat-up bike, but yet he could just, like the tortoise in the tortoise and hare story, he could just chug along until he got where he needed to go, and so he got respect that way.

And it morphed over time to mean exactly what Luke’s saying, like these people who aren’t really worthy of respect because, well, there’s a great sentence from John Updike that I really like, talking about people who want to be novelists. And what he says is some of them only want to wear the novelist’s hat, and they don’t want to sit at the novelist’s desk.

And that’s what I’m thinking these Freds are. They want to wear the trappings of the team, but not actually do the work that would make them anywhere near that level of sport. It takes a lot of hours to earn the right to wear a shiny jersey or look good on the bike.

Did you buy the Garmin Sharp jersey?

I buy it, but I don’t wear it. I just look at it because it’s really, I mean, it’s blue argyle, so it’s pretty awesome.

But that’s kind of like owning the jersey for your favorite hockey goalie, right?

Yeah, I think it would be the same kind of thing. You wouldn’t want to wear it to a game or to the rink.

Yeah, you’d just wear it out just to show your pride and be identified as being a fan of that team and that sport.

Yeah.

Well, cool, Luke. Thanks for calling. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks a lot, guys.

All right, take care. Call us again sometime, all right?

Will do.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye.

If you’re in a hobby that’s got a whole bunch of language that you’d like to share, slang, weird stuff, we want your lingo. Dump it on us.

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